Short answers, pulled from the story.
Oliver Hart won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016, sharing it with Bengt R. Holmström, for their work on contract theory. The prize recognized Hart's contributions to understanding how ownership should be allocated and when contracting is more beneficial than direct ownership.
Contractual incompleteness, as defined by Hart's research, refers to the inability of parties to write a contract that covers every possible contingency. Hart argued that whoever owns the physical assets holds the power to make decisions in the gaps left by incomplete contracts, which determines the boundaries and governance of firms.
Hart earned his B.A. in mathematics at King's College, Cambridge in 1969, his M.A. at the University of Warwick in 1972, and his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1974. He later taught at the University of Essex, the London School of Economics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, where he has been based since 1993.
Hart served as a government expert witness in Black and Decker v. U.S.A. and WFC Holdings Corp. (Wells Fargo) v. U.S.A. In both cases, the government used Hart's property rights theory to argue that companies which claimed tax benefits from asset sales had retained effective control of those assets and therefore could not claim genuine ownership transfers.
Hart's most influential papers were co-authored with Sanford J. Grossman and John Hardman Moore. With Grossman, he published foundational work on ownership and corporate control in the 1980s, including a 1986 paper in the Journal of Political Economy. With Moore, he developed the property rights theory of the firm and later work on contracts as reference points.
Hart was knighted as a Knight Bachelor in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to economic theory, making him Sir Oliver Hart.